There are many who have wished that Milton were living at this hour, but not all have taken into account the fact that his great polemical writings demand an heroic kind of attention which modern education does not discipline the majority of our citizens to give. Even in the last century W. E. Channing was moved to lament “the fastidiousness and effeminacy of modern readers” when faced with Milton’s prose writings. He went on to say, in a passage which may serve to introduce our topic, “To be universally intelligible is not the highest merit. A great mind cannot, without injurious constraint, shrink itself to the grasp of common passive readers.” It is wrong therefore to expect it to sacrifice great qualities “that the multitude may keep pace with it.”[128]

The situation which gave rise to Channing’s complaint has grown measurably worse by our day, when the common passive reader determines the level of most publications. The mere pursuance of Milton’s meaning requires an enforcement of attention, and the perception of his judgments requires an active sensibility incompatible with a state of relaxation. There is nothing in Milton for the reader who must be put at ease and treated only to the quickly apprehensible. But along with this turning away from the difficult, there is another cause at work, a feeling, quite truly grounded, that Milton’s very arduousness of spirit calls for elevation on the part of the reader. Milton assumes an heroic stance, and he demands a similar stance of those who would meet him. An age which has come to suspect this as evidence of aristocratic tendency will then avoid Milton also for a moral reason, preferring, even when it agrees with him, to have the case stated in more plebeian fashion. Therefore the reading of Milton is more than a problem in communication; it is a problem also of gaining insight, or even of developing sympathy with the aristocratic intellectualism which breathes through all he wrote.

It can be shown that all of the features which make up Milton’s arduous style proceed from three or four sources. The first of these is the primacy of the concept. What this primacy signifies is that in his prose Milton wrote primarily as a thinker and not as an artificer. That is to say, his units of composition are built upon concepts and not upon conventionalized expository patterns. For him the linguistic sentence was a means, to be expanded and shaped as the driving force of the thought required. Or perhaps it would be more meaningful to say that for him the sentence was an accommodation-form. He will put into it as much or as little as he needs, and often, as we shall see presently, he needed a great deal. This use of the sentence as an accommodation-form produces what is perhaps the most obvious feature of his style, the long period. What length must a sentence have to be called “long”? Of course our usual standard is the sentence we are accustomed to, and in present-day writing that sentence will run 20-30 words, to cite an average range for serious writing. Milton’s sentences very frequently run 60-80 words, and many will exceed 100, the length of an average paragraph today.[129]

To examine Milton’s method with the lengthy period, we may well begin with the second sentence of Of Reformation in England, an outstanding specimen of 373 words.

With reference to accommodation, let us attend to the scope of this sentence. It contains nothing less than a history of Christianity from the Protestant reformer’s point of view. Four stages are given in this history: the early revelation of true Christianity; its later misinterpretation through the “grossness and blindness” of its followers; the growth of institutionalism; and finally the atrophy of true religion produced by undue attention to outward circumstance. It is, as we see, a complete narration, dressed out with many illuminating details. We shall discover that Milton habitually prolongs a sentence thus until it has covered the unit of its subject. He feels no compulsion to close the period out of regard for some established norm, since he has his eye on a different criterion of completeness. In line with the same practice, some of his sentences are so fitted that they contain complete arguments, or even an argument preceded by its expository narration. As an example of the sentence containing a unit of argument, we may note the following from The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.

And yet there follows upon this a worse temptation: for if he be such as hath spent his youth unblameably, and laid up his chiefest earthly comforts in the enjoyments of a contented marriage, nor did neglect that furtherance which was to be obtained therein by constant prayers; when he shall find himself bound fast to an uncomplying discord of nature, or, as it often happens, to an image of earth and phlegm, with whom he looked to be the copartner of a sweet and gladsome society, and sees withal that his bondage is now inevitable; though he be almost the strongest Christian, he will be ready to despair in virtue, and mutiny against Divine Providence; and this doubtless is the reason of those lapses, and that melancholy despair, which we see in many wedded persons, though they understand it not, or pretend other causes, because they know no remedy; and is of extreme danger: therefore when human frailty surcharged is at such a loss, charity ought to venture much, lest an overtossed faith endanger to shipwreck.[131] This sentence contains a complete hypothetical syllogism, which can be abstracted as follows:

Thus the argument prescribes the content of the sentence and marshals it.

Let us look next at a specimen from the Areopagitica embodying not only the full syllogism but also a preparatory exposition.

In this utterance of 197 words, every detail pertains to the one concept of the responsibility and dignity of learning; yet closer inspection reveals that a two-part structure is accommodated. First there is the “narration,” a regular part of the classical oration, here setting forth the industry and conscientiousness of authors. This is followed by a hypothetical argument saying, in effect, that if all these guarantees of sober and honest performance are not enough to entitle authors to liberty, there can be no respect for learning or learned men in the commonwealth. Thus the sentence is prolonged, one might say, until the speech is made, and the speech is not a series of loosely related assertions but a structure defined by standard principles of logic and rhetoric.

Apart from mere length, which as Whatley and other writers on style observe, imposes a burden upon the memory too great to be expected of everyone, there is in the longer Miltonic sentence the additional tax of complexity. Of course Milton was somewhat influenced by Latin grammar, but here we are less interested in measuring literary influences than in analyzing the reading problem which he presents in our day. That problem is created largely by his intricate elaboration within the long period. For an especially apt illustration of this I should like to return to Of Reformation in England and follow the sentence which introduces that work.

It will be agreed, I feel, that the following features require a more than ordinary effort of attention and memory: (1) The rhetorical interruptions, whereby which is separated from its verb ought to be, and thoughts is separated from its prepositional modifier of God and of his miraculous works and ways among men.—(2) The progressive particularization of our Saviour Christ, wherein the substantive is modified by two participial constructions, suffering to the lowest bent of weakness in the flesh and triumphing to the highest pitch of glory in the spirit; wherein again the substantive spirit takes a modifier in the clause which drew up his body also, and the verb drew up of the clause is qualified by the adverbial clause till we in both be united to him in the revelation of his kingdom. This is a type of elaboration in which, as the account unfolds, each detail seems to require a gloss, which is offered in a construction of some weight or length.—(3) The extensive parallelism of the last part, beginning with the whole passion of pity on the one side.—(4) The suspended structure which withholds the topic phrase of the tract, happy reformation of the church, until almost the end of the sentence.

All of these qualities of length, scope, and complexity made the Miltonic sentence a formidable construction, and we are curious to know why he was able to use it with public success. The first circumstance we must take into account is that he lived in a tough-minded period of Western culture. It was a time when the foundations of the state were being searched out; when the relationship between religion and political authority was being re-defined, to the disregard of old customs; and when sermons were powerful arguments, beginning with first principles and moving down through a long chain of deductions. It was a time in which every thinking man virtually had to be either a revolutionary or a counter-revolutionary; and there is something in such intellectual climate which scorns prettification and mincing measure. The public therefore met Milton’s impassioned interest with an equal passion. But by public we do not mean here the half-educated masses of today; Milton’s public was rather a sternly educated minority, which had been taught to recognize an argument when it saw one, and even to analyze its source.

Further evidence of the absorbing interest in the argumentative burden of prose expression may be seen in the way he employs the extended metaphor. Milton grew up in the age of the metaphysical conceit. We now understand that for Elizabethans and Jacobeans a metaphor went far beyond mere ornamentation to enter into the very heart of a predication. Rosemund Tuve in particular has shown that for the poets of the period an image was an argument, so understood and so used.[134] We would hardly expect it to be any less so in prose. When Milton brings in a metaphor, he makes full use of its probative value, and this involved, along with confidence in the architectonic power of the image, a belief that it affirmed something about the case in point. Thus the metaphor was not idle or decorative merely, and it dominated the passage to the eclipse of sentence units. This will explain why, when Milton begins a metaphor, he will scarcely abandon it until the last appropriate application has been made and the similitude established beyond reasonable question.

The Areopagitica teems with brilliant extended figures, of which two will be cited. Here is an image of truth, carried through three sentences.

And here is Milton’s defense of the intellectually free community, rendered in a military metaphor.

Milton’s concept of church government according to Scripture is thus presented in The Reason of Church Government Urged Against Prelaty:

What we are especially called upon to note in these examples is the boldness of figuration, by which the concept survives the pressure of many, and sometimes rather concrete, tests of correspondence, as the analogy enlarges. The author’s faith in the figure as an organizing principle is likely evidence that he sees the world as form, the more of which can be drawn out the better. To a later day, any figure carried beyond modest length runs the danger of turning into an ironic commentary upon its analogue, but to Milton, as to the seventeenth century generally, it was a window to look through. Now quite literally the conceit is a concept, and we have found it to be another organizing medium of this intellectual prose, and a second proof that some texture of thought precedes the mere linguistic expression, and holds itself superior to it.

While the primacy of the concept is responsible for these formal features of style, we must look elsewhere for the source of its vigor. Certainly another reason that Milton is a taxing author to read is the restless energy that permeates his substance. He never allows the reader to remain inert, and this is because there were few things toward which Milton himself was indifferent. One revelation of the active mind is the zeal and completeness with which it sorts things according to some scale of values; and judged by that standard Milton’s mind is active in the extreme. To approach this a little more systematically, what one discovers with one’s first reading of the prose is that Milton is constantly attentive to the degrees of things, and his range of valuations, extending from those things which can be described only through his elegant curses to those which require the language of religious or poetic eulogy, is very great. Indeed, “things indifferent,” to employ a phrase used by Milton himself, play a very small part in his writing, which rather tends to be juridical in the highest measure. And the vitality contributed by this awareness of difference he increased by widening the gulf between the bad and the good. These contrarieties are managed in various ways: sometimes they are made up of single nouns of opposed meaning; sometimes of other parts of speech or of phrases; but always it would take a dull reader to miss the opposed valuations. A sentence from The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce will afford some good examples.

The vigor of this passage arises from a continuing series of contrasts, comprising the following: error and custom with truth and solid wisdom; God with man; prudent and religious counsels with encroachments and also with inveterate blots and obscurities; subtle insinuating of error and custom with industry of free reasoning; and womb of teeming truth with unchewed notions and suppositions.

Here is another passage, from Of Reformation in England.

In this the clash is between plebeian life and stately palaces, rich furniture, etc.; homespun verity and lordship’s acquaintance; threadbare matron and better clothes; chaste and modest vail and wanton tresses, staring tire, and gaudy allurements of a whore. Lastly I should like to take a sentence from the same work, which has been admired by Aldous Huxley for its energy.

In this typical specimen of Milton’s vehemence, gravest and worthiest minister, a true bishop contrasts with insulting and only canon-wise prelate and with slight paltry companion; the people of God, redeemed and washed with Christ’s blood, and dignified with so many glorious titles of saints and sons in the gospel with impure ethnics and lay dogs; stones, pillars, and crucifixes with Christ’s living members; communion with separation; fortified with bulwark and barricado with the earlier unity and meekness; obscene, surfeited, paw, and mammock with priest; and sacramental bread with tavern biscuit.

The effect of such sustained contrast is to produce a high degree of tonicity, and here in a word is why Milton’s prose seems never relaxed. His pervading consciousness of the combat of good and evil caused him to engage in constant projections of that combat. In a manner of speaking, Milton always writes from a “prejudice,” which proves to be on inspection his conviction as a Christian and as a political and moral preacher, that, as the good has been judged, the duty of a publicist is to show it separated with the utmost clearness of distinction from the bad. Accordingly Milton’s expositions, if one follows them intently, cause one to accept one thing and reprobate another unceasingly.

In consequence there appears in many passages a quality of style which I shall call the superlative mode. His very reaching out toward the two extremes of a gauge of value drives him to couch expression in terms raised to their highest degree. Often we see this in the superlative form of the adjective. But we see it also in his employment of words which even in their grammatically positive forms have acquired a kind of superlative sense. Finally we see it on occasion in a pattern of incremental repetition which he uses to impress us with his most impassioned thoughts. The wonderful closing prayer from Of Reformation in England contains examples of all of these superlatives. Here are the closing paragraphs.

Let us mark the bristling superlatives. Of adjectives in superlative form we find most certain, soberest, wisest, most Christian, darkest, deepest, basest, lowermost, most dejected, most underfoot, and [most] downtrodden. Of those words which have a superlative force or meaning, I would list—allowing that this must be a matter of judgment—naught, cancel, broken, marvellous, fervent, eternal, universal, undoubtedly, supereminence, beatific, dateless, irrevoluble, eternity, inseparable, overmeasure, for ever, and eternally. But the most interesting form of the superlative mode is the pattern of repetition by which Milton, through a progressive accumulation of substantives and adjectives, builds up a crescendo. First there will be one or more groups of two, then perhaps a group of three, and finally, for the supreme effect, a breathtaking collocation of five. Such a pattern appears in the concluding sentence of the prayer: impairing and diminution; distresses and servitude; dignity, rule, and promotion; darkest and deepest; control, trample, and spurn; raving and bestial; slaves and negroes; basest, lowermost, most dejected, most underfoot and downtrodden. Here, it will be noticed, the sequence is 2-2-3-2-3-2-2-5. The pattern in itself is revealing. First there are two pairs which ready us for attaining the group of three; then another pair to rest upon before we attain the group of three again; then two more pairs for a longer respite while we ready ourselves for the supreme effort of the group of five.

The prayer is not, of course, an ordinary passage; yet what is seen here is discoverable in some measure in all of Milton’s prose. He wrote in this superlative vein because his principal aim was the divorcement of good and evil. To show these wide apart, he had to talk in terms of best and worst, and being a rhetorician of vast resources, he found ways of making the superlative even more eminent than our regular grammatical forms make it, which naturally marks him as a great creative user of the language.

The topic of grouping appropriately introduces another aspect of Milton’s style which I shall refer to more specifically as systematic collocation. No one can read him with the object of forming some descriptive image of his prose without being impressed by his frequent use of pairs of words similar in meaning to express a single object or idea. These pairs will be comprised, in a roughly equal number of instances, of nouns and of adjectives, though fairly often two verbs will make up the collocation and occasionally two adverbs. It seems probable that these pairs, more than any other single feature of the style, give the impression of thickness, which is in turn the source of the impression of strength. Or to present this in another way, what the pairs create is the effect of dimension. It needs no proving at this stage that Milton had too well stored a mind and too genuine a passion to coast along on mere fluency. If he used two words where another author would use one, that fact affords presumption that his second word had its margin of meaningful addition to contribute. And so we find it: these pairs of substantives give his prose a dimensional quality, because this one will show one aspect of the thing named and that one another. It would require a rather long list to include the variety of aspects which Milton will bring out by his practice of double naming; sometimes it is in form and substance, or the conceptual and the material nature of the thing; sometimes it is appearance and meaning; sometimes process and tendency; sometimes one modifier will express the active and another the passive nature of the thing described. Always the practice causes his subject matter to convey this sensation of depth and realness, which is a principal factor in the vitality of his style.

We shall look at some examples of this highly interesting method. The first is from the Areopagitica. I have italicized the pairs.

Noble and puissant direct attention to ethical and to physical attributes; purging and scaling do not form so complementary a pair but perhaps denote two distinct phases of a process; timorous and flocking is an excellent pair to show inward nature and outward behavior, and must be accounted one of the most successful uses of the method; sects and schisms would seem to refer to social or ecclesiastical and to theological aspects of division.

In a sentence from Of Reformation in England, he says: “But what do I stand reckoning upon advantages and gains lost by the misrule and turbulency of the prelates?”[143] Advantages and gains stand for two sorts of progress made prior to the misrule and turbulency of the prelates, which in turn signify the formal outward policies and the inner spirit of ambition and presumption. From the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce: “The ignorance and mistake of this high point hath heaped up one huge half of all the misery that hath been since Adam.”[144] Here ignorance would seem to describe a passive lack of awareness, whereas mistake describes active misapprehension or misapplication. Finally here are examples from Animadversions upon the Remonstrant’s Defence Against Smectymnuus.

Here private and personal may be taken as giving us two aspects of the individual; rule and example differ as abstract and concrete; detecting and convincing (the latter apparently in the older sense of “overcoming”) denote two stages of a process; truth and his country’s peace may be taken to express the metaphysical and the embodied forms of the same thing; voluble and smart seem to refer to what is perceivable by the senses and by the intellect respectively; long usurpation and convicted pseudepiscopy differ as simple action and action which has been judged: God and man bring together the divine and the human; explode and hiss out of the land again express two stages of a process.

In the manner here indicated, these collocations serve to give the style a wonderful richness of thought. The reader feels that he is being shown both the esse and the potesse of the object named. At least, he gets a look at its manifold nature. The way in which Milton fills out the subject for his reader is at once lavish and perspicuous. Just as his figures were seen to have a prolonged correspondence, beyond what the casual or unthinking writer would bring to view, so his substantives and predicates are assembled upon a principle of penetration or depth of description.

Our general impression of Milton—an impression we get in some degree of all the great writers of his period and of the Elizabethan period before it—is that his thought dominates the medium. While the distinction between what is said and the form of saying it can never be drawn absolutely, it is yet to be remarked that some writers seem to compose with an awareness of how their matter will look upon the page, or how it will sound in the parlor; others seem to keep their main attention upon currently preferred terms and idioms. Again, some writers seem to accept the risk of suspension, transposition, and involution out of conscious elegance; Milton seems rather to require them out of strength of purpose. He was not a writer of writing, but consistently a writer of substance, and the language was his instrumentality, which he used with the familiar boldness of a master. One would go far to find a better illustration of the saying of John Peale Bishop that the English language is like a woman; it is most likely to yield after one has shown it a little violence. All of the great prose writers of the Elizabethan age and the Seventeenth century were perfectly capable of showing it that violence, and I believe this is the true reason that a lover of eloquence today reacts their works with irrepressible admiration. The tremendous suspensions and ramifications they were willing to create; their readiness to make function the test of grammar and to coin according to need, through all of which a rational, though not always a formal or codified syntax survives—these things bespeak a sort of magisterial attitude toward language which has been lost in the intervening centuries.

It is quite possible that long years of accumulated usage tend to act as a deterrent to a free and imaginative use of language. So many stereotypes have had time to form themselves, and so many manuals of usage have been issued that the choice would seem to lie between simple compliance and open rebellion. Either one uses the language as the leaders of one’s social and business world use it, or one makes a decisive break and uses it in open defiance of the conventionalized patterns. We may remember in this connection that when the new movement in modern literature got underway in the second decade of this century, its leaders proved themselves the most defiant and brash kind of rebels as they embarked upon the work of resuscitation and refurbishment, and it was to the Elizabethans especially that they looked for sanction and guidance. But the rebel with this program faces a dilemma: he cannot infuse life into the old forms that he knows are depriving expression of all vitality, and he exhausts himself in the campaign to smash and get rid of them.

That is partly an historical observation, and our interest is in laying bare the movement of a great eloquence. Yet if we had to answer whether some heroic style like that of Milton cannot be formed for our own day, when millions might rejoice to hear a sonorous voice speaking out of a deep learning in our traditions, our answer would surely be, yes. And if asked how, we would begin our counsel by telling the writer to heed the advice in Emerson’s American Scholar—better indeed than Emerson heeded it himself—to look upon himself not as a writer but as a man writing, and to try to live in that character. As long as one does that, it is most likely that the concept will dominate the medium, and that one will use, with inventive freedom, such conventionality as is necessary to language. A timid correctness, like perfect lucidity, sometimes shows that more attention has been devoted to the form than to the thought, and this may give the writing a kind of hard surface which impedes sympathy between writer and reader. Finally, one should remember that people like to feel they are hearing of the solid fact and substance of the world, and those epithets which give us glimpses of its concreteness and contingency are the best guarantors of that. The regular balancing of abstract and concrete modifiers, which we meet regularly in Shakespeare, mirrors, indeed, the situation all of us face in daily living, where general principles are clear in theory but are conditioned in their application to the concrete world. The man of eloquence must be a lover of “the world’s body” to the extent of being able to give it a fond description.

With these conditions practically realized, we might again have orators of the heroic mold. But the change would have to include the public also, for, on a second thought suggested by Whitman, to have great orators there must be great audiences too.